Hiking - a reading (on YouTube)
Heavy-heeled and authoritative,
Our boot gait claims the land,
A Chinese farm of root-filled
Stairs terraced down the trail.
Blazes like painted breadcrumbs
Lead out from gravel parking lots,
Where primitive bathrooms
Smell like other people’s piss.
We climb beside tumbling waters,
Up six hundred prison labor steps,
Our progress held captive to
Our hearts and conditioning.
Like breathless children
Chasing Christmas lights,
Around each corner we
Find another present.
A fluttering swarm of ladybugs
In color-coordinated jackets
Mirror the fall foliage in
Polka-dotted yellow-orange-red.
Purple blossoms cling to roadside
Shoulders like a nude model’s drape,
The velvet warmth of summer before
Winter’s brushstrokes lay her bare.
Construction-vested bees and bumbles
Vie with beer bottle green flies
As they binge on the ambrosia
Of autumn’s last call nectar.
A centipede undulates across
Waves of garden-bordered scree,
Dodging the blind rush of tourists
Chasing pamphlet-cover vistas.
Concentric rings of raindrops
Conceal a school of rainbow tails
Scalloping in the shadows of
A sandy-bottomed pool.
Nestled in holiday-scented needle beds
At the end of the last secluded trail,
Leafy lichened guardians eye the forest
With deer tracks and other arcane symbols.
We cherish each new memory
Like a dog-eared photograph.
Unlacing our boots with a sigh,
We allow our feet to breathe.
© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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The last of the four poems inspired by our N. Georgia vacation. These are mostly the pickup lines I’d jotted down that didn’t fit in the other three.
The line about the bathrooms was inspired by both this trip and our trip to N. Carolina for our anniversary six months earlier. Georgia was slightly better than N. Carolina in that they mostly had bathrooms even if they were primitive and smelled atrocious (at least the men’s). N. Carolina hadn’t bothered to even equip the trailheads with those. Worse were the Federal sites where the bathrooms had been boarded up due to the Sequester, apparently to remain that way indefinitely. Disgraceful and disgusting that all three governments present that face to visitors from around the world of their parks of spectacular natural beauty.
Ironically, many of the larger state parks we visited were founded in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservations Corps. We, as a country, missed an opportunity to revitalize our parks in 2009. Though in Amicalola Falls State Park, Georgia relied on state prisoners to carve a stepped path up the mountain. Perhaps the strangest brass commemoration plaque I’ve ever seen.
The centipede that Karen spotted (and guarded until he had completed his transit across the trail) prompted several men to pretend to stomp it (over her objections). One wanted to pin it in a killing jar for his collection. Uhm, no. Thankfully, I didn’t have to defend her Buddhist defense.
In this case, anthropologists are completely uncertain whether “deer tracks” might be a euphemism. Either way, the glyphs were reminiscent of Iron Age rock carvings we saw in Scotland and Wales.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteWe stopped at an overlook that was a little obscured by the trees growing on the downward slope beside it. And while that view was a little disappointing, the swarm of Lady Bugs on the tree beside the parking area was more then worth the stop. There really were bugs of several different colors. The photo is not color corrected or manipulated. Thankfully those two bugs decided to pose close together for their portrait.